physics major class of 09

interesteddad
Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:25:30 +0000

Marlgirl:

My daughter had only had the basic public high school physics course - just your basic classical physics. I don’t believe that it had covered any of the quantuum stuff. She had AP Calc, but it had stopped with the AB stuff. She had not done power series.

I don’t think it was any big problem for the Physics seminar. From what she told me, the math in the first half of the course (Special Relativity) was no big deal. I think that, as they got into the second half (Quantuum), there was some math that she hadn’t done before. Most of the kids in the class were in the same boat and the professor taught them some of the math as part of the seminar. This intro seminar is really not about the math so much, but rather exploring the concept of how the speed of an object lengthen or shortens the perceived time.

Interestingly, calculus was the course that most tested my daughter. Math had come easy for her, including terrific math SAT and SATII scores. At Swarthmore, they divide up the Calc A/B/C into three half semesters and you dive in where you left off in high school. With a 5 on the AP Calc AB test, my D was placed into last third of the sequence: power series. It drove her nuts from start to finish. I don’t think power series ever clicked for her conceptually as math always had and the shift from “finding the answer” problem solving to proofs was a difficult transition. My sense is that this is a very widespread experience going from high school to college math.

She’s now looking at taking several more math course (including linear algebra), but focused more on sequence that will give her very good statistical analysis skills for social science fields, but not the full immersion four-year high-end math track required for a math or physics major.